Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Du contract social; ou principes du droit politique. édition pirate - 1762

Rousseau J.J. The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right. Amsterdam, Marc Michel Rey, 1763

17.3 x 10.5 cm, pages 1 - IV - 202, bound in full parchment with a title on the spine on a label.

Interesting pirate edition (Type A, i.e. lacking the note on civil marriage) of The Social Contract, mistakenly regarded as Lyonese by Bernard Gagnebin, who had prepared for Pléiade the complete edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s works. Since it was known that in Lyon, in 1762, the printer Jean-Baptiste Réguilliat had been arrested on the spot for clandestinely producing a counterfeit of the Contrat social, the presence of that particular edition with its typical pirate appearance among the Lyon library’s holdings led Gagnebin to attribute the volume to Réguilliat’s Lyon workshop. It was Dominique Varry’s studies that corrected the error; he analyzed the typographic materials of the Lyon workshop of Réguilliat (ornaments, initials, wood engravings, paper types, and the composition of the fascicles), demonstrating that the true pirate edition clandestinely produced in Lyon in 1762 possessed material characteristics clearly distinct from the Lyon edition studied by Gagnebin.